SEARCHING FOR SANITY IN THE TIME OF TRUMP
Deep State civil servants, you have a choice: to be beheaded, drawn and quartered, or shot at dawn.
Sanity. I haven’t seen it in the last four years. And I’m ready to jump off Trump’s Crazy Train before it crashes.
When a freshman at UCLA many years ago I was taught in the intro to philosophy course that what makes humans so special is their power to reason, think rationally, with logic as their guide. So you can understand how stunned I was when Donald J. Trump ascended to the throne with his bloodthirsty cultists in tow. Nothing has been the same since, and recent post-election events have left me wondering whether there is a sane Trumper still alive, and whether any of them ever matriculated.
Take Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, probably the most mentally challenged of the 100 who claim membership to what President James Buchanan called the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Keep in mind that Buchanan has been called by many the worst president we’ve ever had (prior to Trump, of course), and a senator before that, so he might not be impartial on the subject.
Anyway, when Trump tool Attorney General Bill Barr actually came out and admitted there was no evidence that the presidential election was rigged, Senator Johnson challenged Barr to “show the evidence” that it wasn’t. Come again? One of the first things I learned in that philosophy class of long ago is that you cannot prove a negative! It’s analogous to being forced to prove you are innocent in a court of law. No, it’s the prosecution that must prove you guilty! Back to the University of Minnesota you go, Ron, and this time take some courses besides business and accounting.
Not to be outdone in the advanced stupidity class, Joe diGenova, a Trump attorney whose politics are slightly to the right of Charlemagne’s, really came out with a Zen baffler. Joe went into a reactive rage when Christopher Krebs*, Trump’s Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, stated that “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised” in the presidential election. For his honesty, Krebs (a lifelong Republican) was summarily fired by Trump…by tweet, as is Dear Leader’s wont. DiGenova went considerably further in his angry reaction to Krebs’s verdict: “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be head of cybersecurity, that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
Almost immediately I asked myself how one could do such a thing? I mean, from what I’ve read, you need four horses pulling in different directions to quarter the traitor, presumably with some innards spilling out behind the diverging steeds.
Question, Joe: Which of the quartered parts do you take out and shoot the next morning? Is it the one with the head still attached to which you administer the coup de grâce? What if the head has been detached and remains in the trail of offal left in the wakes of the departing horses? Do you shoot the head rather than one of the four quartered torsos? You know, on second thought, I suggest you reverse the entire process. Better to shoot Krebs first, store him inside overnight, then at dawn take his body out and hitch it (him?) to the horses for quartering.
By the way, are you planning to invite the public to the spectacle, as they did back in Merrie Olde Medieval England? Then I’d take the precaution of chilling the corpse overnight, lest it begin to rot and cut down on attendance. Will you be charging admission? If so, I would delay the actual execution until mid-morning. Dawn’s a bit early for a lot of our GOP slugabeds, and you want to maximize your gate. A last question, Joe: Have you arranged for a clean-up crew? Methinks the grounds will be rather a mess, and I can’t imagine you bloodying your hands with that. Best of luck.
You know dear reader, I doubt that the dweebish Joe diGenova is really up to the task of executing anyone. He just talks a grisly game. Perhaps he should turn over the killing to an able paisano, a guy who is never far from a camera before which he will embarrass himself; yes, I’m referring to Rudy “Skullface” Giuliani, who seems much more qualified to make the hit. He expressed his wish to join in on the frenzied bloodletting by telling Sean Hannity of Fox News that “someone should cut the head off” of the Democratic Party. Now that would take some doing, and with all the important legal cases he’s handling, I don’t think he could find time on his crowded agenda to take on another killing.
Perhaps a better candidate for the gory chore is Dapper Steve Bannon, who has said he would double down and behead both FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world-renowned expert on infectious diseases. “I’d actually go back to the old times of Tudor England,” he said. “I’d put the heads on pikes, right? I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to Federal bureaucrats: You either get with the program or you’re gone.”
While some might argue that beheading is a more humane method of execution (it’s over in an instant, I’m told) than being pulled apart by four horses and then shot in the dead head, Bannon’s “doubleheader” was apparently too much in-your-face bloodletting for Bannon’s white-shoe lawyer, William A. Burck. Lawyer? Yes, Mr. Burck was representing Bannon in a well-publicized federal fraud case in Manhattan; Burck, in a letter to the court, announced that “Mr. Bannon [was] in the process of retaining new counsel.”
Quite a setback for Mr. Bannon, who, along with three confederates, is charged with siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars for some personal high-living—funds that were ostensibly collected from other Trumpers to build for their boss the Great Wall of Trump. Is that the same boss who’s behind all this blood lust? Who’s stirring the hate pot? The cur in the manger that seems intent on dismembering our nation?
Yep. You got it. Our Orange Eminence himself. Putin’s pet puppet. Erostratus redux. None other than Dimwit Donald, the sore loser of the 2020 presidential election by more than seven million votes. Even in the “rigged” Electoral College Biden won, 306 to 232—the same “landslide” numbers that Trump won by in 2016. Talk about irony.
As for this yearning for bloodshed, I hear the militias are talking civil war. The Proud Boys are standing by. The biker gangs have their chains out. The ICEmen cometh.
You know, this is no country for old men. Stop the Crazy Train. This is where I get off.
*Krebs is a life-long Republican. His defiant honesty lifted him to a near-hero’s status among the mentally sound of his party….all eight of them. He deserves our respect…and then some.